Sympathetic, fully realized characters and good use of period details make this a winning work of historical fiction.
Quiet, assured debut novel set in medieval England, concerning a young woman’s entry into the religious life—one as tumultuous as anything on the outside.
Early on in Australian writer Cadwallader’s narrative, we learn that young Sarah, still a teenager, has lost her sister in childbirth: “Emma didn’t speak, just looked at me, her eyes fading. Blood dripped, then ran.” The elegant understatement of that terrible moment speaks to Cadwallader’s approach throughout: the England of the mid-13th century is a place of rupture, oppression, intolerance, and violence outside, but within the tight-holding walls of the Midlands church and the “rough lodging” it offers, little of that outside world can enter. Even so, in time, Sarah, though seeking escape, engages with that world—and she must, for it presses in on all sides. And besides, she’s not quite cut out for the isolation. Cadwallader is a poet of loneliness; few writers have captured so completely the essential madness that accompanies hermitage, the grayness and sameness of each and every day: “The stones were faces that came out when my candle was alight, some laughing, some staring, some as sad as me.” She is also very good at describing the power relations that inhere in religious hierarchy (“Sister, I’m your confessor and guide. You are to obey me in all things, as your Rule says”) without resorting to too-easy anachronisms, though Sarah does have her protofeminist moments. In a time when self-assertion was tantamount to sin, Cadwallader’s language and tone seem just right. Readers may wish there were a little more action to move the story along, but this is an appropriately contemplative piece that is kin less to Ellis Peters’ Cadfael mysteries than to Mary Sharratt’s Illuminations as imaginings of medieval faith and the faithful.
Sympathetic, fully realized characters and good use of period details make this a winning work of historical fiction.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-10425-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
A gentle exploration of tragedy, hope, the power of Christmas, and the possibility of miracles.
Preparing for Christmas in Cambridge, Massachusetts, church members face challenges aided by faith and friends and inspired by the eponymous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—who, in an alternate storyline, fights despair as he confronts personal tragedy and the Civil War.
Christmas is fast approaching, and St. Margaret’s Catholic Church is a hub of activity. The children’s choir, under Sophia’s talented guidance, is practicing its program, which includes “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” the lovely carol based on the poem by Cambridge’s own Longfellow. Sophia is determined to remain optimistic this season, despite her recently broken engagement and the threat of losing her job next spring. After all, these children lift her spirits, and she can always depend on Lucas, the saintly accompanist, to be there for her. Particularly talented are the red-haired siblings, serious Charlotte and precocious Alex, whose father is serving with the National Guard in Afghanistan and whose mother is overwhelmed by the crushing news that her beloved husband is missing, a fact she's trying to keep secret. Father Ryan loves his calling and his congregants and is doing his best to aid them in their trials even as he navigates his own fractured family. The odd but cheerful, elderly Sister Winifred offers help and reassurance with eerily perfect timing and perception. Meanwhile, in a separate historical storyline that is lightly attached to the contemporary one, we follow Longfellow through the Civil War and the life-altering events that tested his faith and nearly crushed his spirit. Chiaverini stitches together a series of lightly interlocking contemporary vignettes in an intriguing way and manages to tuck away all the ragged edges in the emotionally satisfying conclusion. In the background are Longfellow’s tragic Civil War–era experiences, which, while poignant, feel emotionally distant.
A gentle exploration of tragedy, hope, the power of Christmas, and the possibility of miracles.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95524-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
A well-imagined if somber window into social collapse.
A dystopian vision of a future United States undone by civil war and plague.
El Akkad’s debut novel is set during the tail end of the 21st century, with the North and South at it again. Southern states have taken up arms to protest a Northern ban on fossil fuels, and the war-torn secessionist “Mag” (Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia) has forced civilians to herd in refugee camps. (South Carolina, attacked by a weaponized virus, is “a walled hospice.”) Among the refugees is Sarat, who as a young girl in 2075 escaped a much-diminished Louisiana (climate change has swallowed the coasts) with her family to what seems like an endless occupation. But in the years tracked by the novel, Sarat becomes a daring young woman who leads a resistance against the Northern military. El Akkad, a journalist who’s reported from hot spots in the war on terror, has a knack for the language of officialdom: news reports, speeches, history books, and the like that provide background for the various catastrophes that have befallen the country. And he’s cannily imagined Sarat, who is at once a caring daughter and sibling, freedom fighter, and sponge for the wisdom of one old-timer who dispenses tales about occupations decades past. But above all, El Akkad’s novel is an allegory about present-day military occupation, from drone strikes to suicide bombers to camps full of refugees holding “keys to houses that no longer existed in towns long ago deserted.” He imagines this society in some creative ways: battles royal are major entertainments in an internet-free society, and Sarat’s brother becomes an interesting and peculiar folk hero after he’s injured. But El Akkad mainly means to argue that these future miseries exist now overseas.
A well-imagined if somber window into social collapse.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49358-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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